A bridge over troubled water: the fate of Oregon Inlet and the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge pits environmentalists against business interests on the Outer Banks.

As the Angel Dawn churns seaward from its home port of Bayboro, the gentle swells of Pamlico Sound give way to choppier waters. Virgil Lockey III spots the broad arch of the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge a mile ahead and, beyond, the Atlantic. It's early March, and he has his 80-foot trawler rigged for flounder. As he nears the bridge, the 43-year-old captain is alarmed by what he doesn't see: "There wasn't any water where the buoys were." He throttles back. There should be 12 feet of water beneath the Angel Dawn, but the trawler lurches to a halt as its keel grinds into the bottom. Beneath Lockey's feet, a 5-knot ebb tide sucks water out of the sound and tugs at the boat's wooden hull. From the other direction, waves from the Atlantic crash over the gunwales and shatter windows. As the engine room floods and the trawler wallows helplessly, Lockey broadcasts a Mayday. Then he and his two crew members squeeze into survival suits.

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The Coast Guard gets the call about 2:30 p.m. From a nearby lifesaving station; crews scramble into two boats, but sandbars prevent them from reaching the trawler. They radio for a helicopter from the air station in Elizabeth City, 50 miles away. It's after 4 when the twin-engine H-60 Jayhawk approaches. It dangles its rescue basket and, one by one, hoists the three men. As they look back, the sea already is bashing the Angel Dawn to splinters, another victim of one of the most treacherous passages on the East Coast. Since the 1960s, 25 people have died and 22 boats have been lost in the 1,300-foot-wide gantlet that separates Hatteras Island from the northern Outer Banks. The Angel Dawn is one of five boats capsized in a recent 12-month period.

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Oregon Inlet has always been beautiful and treacherous. Now it is in the eye of a man-made tempest over how to deal with natural forces. At stake could be more lives and vessels, not to mention the financial health of the state's $100 million-a-year seafood industry and of its taxpayers, who'll foot the bill for hundreds of millions of dollars in bridge, highway and dredging projects. The problems aren't new, but they've become urgent. In May, the White House Council on Environmental Quality killed a 30-year-old plan to keep the inlet open with jetties to block the shifting sands that choke it. Now plans for one of the longest, most spectacular bridges on the East Coast are gaining momentum, but they face hurdles such as cost and the opposition of many Outer Bankers--including one of the state's most powerful politicians.

Mariners say shoaling, the constant inflow of sand, is making the inlet increasingly dangerous by narrowing channels like the nozzle of a fire hose, increasing the velocity of currents. The Herbert C. Bonner Bridge over the inlet and the highway it carries--N.C. 12--are the only means of land access for tourists, residents, fishermen and others who spend $300 million a year on the Outer Banks. "It's vital that we have access to all of the land south of the Oregon Inlet bridge and that we have access to the ocean through the inlet," County Commissioner Richard Johnson says. "Without it, there's very little difference between Dare and any other county by the ocean."

Controversy centers on two issues. One is the recently vetoed jetty plan, which would have cost $114 million. It was the alternative that sport and commercial fishermen favored. "Every other state where you go fishing--like South Carolina, Georgia and Florida--has jetties. But not North Carolina at Oregon Inlet," fumes Lockey, who is from Alliance, a Pamlico County crossroads. He and his crew escaped the Angel Dawn, soaked and cold but unhurt. "It would save lives, and you've got a family to feed."

Environmentalists, however, were pleased by the decision. Not only would jetties interfere with the inlet's natural movement south and damage hundreds of acres of shoreline, they don't make economic sense: The jetty project, they say, would amount to a more than $500,000 subsidy for each of the 215 fishing boats that regularly use the inlet. They also say their arguments--that nature should be allowed to run its course--have been buttressed by the new inlet that Hurricane Isabel cut in September, 40 miles south near the village of Hatteras. "It's all part of barrier-island evolution," says Robert Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee. "As old inlets become inefficient or clogged with sand, new ones open somewhere else." Nevertheless, the state is spending $4 million to fill the 1,700-foot gap and rebuild the road.

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The second issue relates to the first. If the jetty plan is doomed, how should the state replace the deteriorating, 40-year-old Bonner Bridge? One proposal, favored by the state Department of Transportation, calls for a $260 million bridge and causeway that would jut into Pamlico Sound from the northern shore of Oregon Inlet and skirt 17 miles of Hatteras Island before coming ashore again at Rodanthe. That version would carry the highway four miles into the sound, away from the environmentally sensitive Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, and it would have a life span of 100 years. Alternatives call for shorter bridges. Regardless, experts say, the future of Oregon Inlet, which is moving south 70 feet a year, depends on continued dredging at a cost of about $4 million a year.

Marc Basnight, president pro tem of the state Senate and a Dare County resident, says he and many Outer Bankers don't like any of the options. They want to replace the Bonner Bridge with a similar span and assure access to the northern end of Pea Island. "People of common means fish there," Basnight says. "In America you shouldn't leave this segment of society out. People come here for birding, fishing, family outings and surfing." He favors a toll to help pay for the replacement and frets that a 17-mile bridge--nearly out of sight of land at some points--would terrify some drivers. "If it's stormy or you're fearful or get anxiety attacks, that's a long ride. A good percentage of people are afraid of bridges. You're going to be locking them up down there permanently."

Those are the lines in the sand that define the Oregon Inlet fight. But beneath all the options lies a larger issue that has vexed Tar Heels for decades: How much should the government do to fight nature on fragile barrier islands? Nobody disputes the Outer Banks' watery, wind-swept charm. What few know, experts say, is that Oregon Inlet is still in its geologic infancy. Cut by a hurricane in 1846, it has moved about two miles south since then as currents shift sand, building up its northern shore while eroding its southern side. The dune line and vegetation aren't natural. They were built and planted as part of a federal work project during the Depression. "The dune has provided a false sense of security for 70 years," says Orrin Pilkey, a Duke University earth-sciences professor and longtime opponent of development on this "restless ribbon of sand."

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Giant cool and warm ocean currents collide near Cape Hatteras, giving the Outer Banks some of the most violent weather and dangerous water on earth. To reach Gulf Stream fishing grounds, charter captain Benjie Stansky must maneuver his 54-footer through the inlet from Oregon Inlet Fishing Center on the sound side of Bodie Island, the inlet's northern shore. Some days, the water is placid. On others, it tosses small vessels like bathtub toys. "I've bulled through waves so tall that once they ripped out all the plastic curtains on my flying bridge."

Hurricane Isabel again demonstrated the ocean's capricious power and underscored how closely linked tide and current are on the Outer Banks. The inlet it cut between Frisco and Hatteras village severed N.C. 12, stranding about 300 residents. Though it's 40 miles away, oceanologists say the breach might have been a response to the shoaling of Oregon Inlet--nature's way of creating a larger drain for waters trapped in the sound to flow back into the Atlantic. Evidence of that, Pilkey says, is that the hurricane did little damage to Oregon Inlet. "We were expecting Oregon Inlet would go down--close--in the storm, but it didn't. It is surprising that the new inlet got so deep so quickly."

Earlier this year, when the federal panel killed the jetty plan, attention shifted to replacing Bonner Bridge and the proposals for how to do it. The simpler one calls for a 6.2-mile bridge that follows the existing one, though it would come ashore farther south to avoid a spot where the ocean is expected to breach N.C. 12. But the bridge would cross more than a mile of Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and is opposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which owns and operates the refuge, visited by more than 2.7 million people each year.

The 17-mile bridge would avoid the refuge, but its $260 million price tag sets off alarms. "We don't have the money to pay for it," Basnight says. Adds County Commissioner Johnson, "That still doesn't address any of the navigational issues or access to Pea Island. It's a skeleton of a cost estimate."

State Transportation Secretary Lyndo Tippett, who has promised to come up with the money, favors the long bridge. Only about $120 million is budgeted, and that puts Tippett, one of the most powerful members of Gov. Mike Easley's cabinet, on a collision course with Basnight, the state's most powerful legislator. Because the transportation budget is allocated by region, Basnight says, Tippett would have to shift money from other projects in northeastern North Carolina, the state's poorest region. "Some of those people have been waiting for their projects for decades," he says.

Cost isn't the plan's only problem. Sport and commercial fishermen, along with local officials and some Dare business executives, note that federal permits for any new bridge require removal of the rock groin on the south side of the inlet. That, they say, would allow sand to shift, quickly filling existing channels. And the region's economy already has had a taste of the consequences when that happens.

On a sunny fall afternoon at a 15-acre boat basin, a trawler and several smaller vessels, including Stansky's SeaNote, are moored to pilings, awaiting their next voyages. A few boats gurgle through the water, but there is far less bustle than visionaries once imagined. This is the village of Wanchese, on the southern tip of Roanoke Island less than 10 miles across the sound from Oregon Inlet. In 1970, the legislature created Wanchese Seafood Industrial Park on 53 acres of marshland here. The boat basin was dredged out to be the center of what was hoped would become a flourishing seafood processing center, luring factories from New England, New Jersey, Virginia and points south.

But shortly after the $8 million park opened in 1981, shifting currents and sand made the inlet impassable. To reach the ocean, commercial fishermen and charter-boat captains had to make a 50-mile, five-hour detour to Hatteras and Ocracoke inlets. By the time Oregon Inlet was dredged and reopened several months later, interest in the seafood park had nearly vanished.

Now, with the jetty plan dead and bridge proposals facing uncertain prospects, memories of the closing are being revived. Business interests fear that permanent loss of the inlet would have an even more devastating impact, considering the degree of commercial and residential development in the region since the early '80s. On the flip side of the issue, though, environmental interests aren't sure the closing would be a bad thing. To understand the dichotomy of opinions, drive south along N.C. 12 over the sweeping rise of the Bonner Bridge.

This ribbon of sand--Hatteras Island--accounts for about 25% of Dare County's nearly $1.2 billion in annual retail sales. Growth has spread across the privately owned pockets of land within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, turning small villages into towns of milliondollar beach houses. "It's a very important part of our economy in real terms," says John S. Bone, president and CEO of The Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce in Kill Devil Hills. In contrast, the remainder of Dare County lies across Pamlico Sound on the mainland to the west--the swampy domain of oversized water moccasins, endangered red wolves, military bombing ranges and poverty. What it doesn't have, local officials say, is development that creates a strong tax base--the kind that exists and needs to be expanded on the Outer Banks.

Weak tax base or not, critics contend it's futile to spend millions of dollars a year, without end, to keep navigable channels open through Oregon Inlet. "Cape Hatteras National Seashore belongs to all Americans, yet it is being abused to serve the real-estate needs of a much smaller number of individuals," Young and Pilkey wrote after Hurricane Isabel in a joint statement urging the state to abandon efforts to keep N.C. 12 open.

Johnson, the county commissioner, represents the common response by Outer Bankers to such suggestions: "You can use that classism argument, but it's bull. Consider the fisherman at Wanchese or the small motel owner. These guys aren't rich, and they're the ones who depend on that inlet."

Despite the hopes of fishermen, charter captains and others that the jetty plan will resurface, government regulators are unlikely to relent. "It's dead," Basnight, who favored it, concedes. "It just never got political traction from either party." On the other hand, the grandest of the plans for Oregon Inlet--the 17-mile bridge--might gain acceptance if both sides bend a bit. Environmentalists say they can accept it. "It's an ingenious idea," Pilkey says, because it would avoid Pea Island and minimize the overall ecological impact. Most of the causeway would be elevated on concrete pilings sunk deep into the bed of Pamlico Sound and wouldn't have to be excavated from the sand after every major storm.

Basnight, many Outer Banks residents and commercial interests are a harder sell, though transportation officials are working on them. DOT officials pledge to maintain access to Pea Island, which locals say is not negotiable. "We really want to keep that open because the refuge is so popular with surf fishermen, surfers and bird-watchers," Bone says. "It's a major tourism attraction on Hatteras Island." One of the plans will be chosen in May 2005, and construction would be completed about 2010.

After decades of squabbling, though, some are losing hope. At the Wanchese industrial park, the shrieks of sanders and drills drift from the shops of Johnson Boat Works. Workers in masks smooth the ribs of a new sportfisherman. Others paint a 60-footer nearly ready to launch. In 1995, legislators gave up on the seafood park and threw open the doors to maritime businesses such as this one. Dean Johnson, a former charter captain and commercial fisherman who sells his million-dollar boats to buyers as far away as Florida, thought he could depend on Oregon Inlet. "I don't see a very good future here. The federal government has let us down. As far as the bridge, it'll be expensive. And as for navigation, it'll be the same old problems."

Virgil Lockey agrees. Jetties, he says, would have tamed the currents that doomed the Angel Dawn. He spent the summer on shrimp boats in the sound. The passage still scares him--"I ain't crazy about it"--but he went back to sea again. As he says, he has a family to feed.

Free-lancer Peter Galuszka has been executive editor of Virginia Business and on the staff of Business Week.